The present invention describes mapping techniques, systems, software and devices, which can be used in 3D pointing devices, as well as in other types of devices.
Technologies associated with the communication of information have evolved rapidly over the last several decades. Television, cellular telephony, the Internet and optical communication techniques (to name just a few things) combine to inundate consumers with available information and entertainment options. Taking television as an example, the last three decades have seen the introduction of cable television service, satellite television service, pay-per-view movies and video-on-demand. Whereas television viewers of the 1960s could typically receive perhaps four or five over-the-air TV channels on their television sets, today's TV watchers have the opportunity to select from hundreds, thousands, and potentially millions of channels of shows and information. Video-on-demand technology, currently used primarily in hotels and the like, provides the potential for in-home entertainment selection from among thousands of movie titles.
The technological ability to provide so much information and content to end users provides both opportunities and challenges to system designers and service providers. One challenge is that while end users typically prefer having more choices rather than fewer, this preference is counterweighted by their desire that the selection process be both fast and simple. Unfortunately, the development of the systems and interfaces by which end users access media items has resulted in selection processes which are neither fast nor simple. Consider again the example of television programs. When television was in its infancy, determining which program to watch was a relatively simple process primarily due to the small number of choices. One would consult a printed guide which was formatted, for example, as series of columns and rows which showed the correspondence between (1) nearby television channels, (2) programs being transmitted on those channels and (3) date and time. The television was tuned to the desired channel by adjusting a tuner knob and the viewer watched the selected program. Later, remote control devices were introduced that permitted viewers to tune the television from a distance. This addition to the user-television interface created the phenomenon known as “channel surfing” whereby a viewer could rapidly view short segments being broadcast on a number of channels to quickly learn what programs were available at any given time.
Despite the fact that the number of channels and amount of viewable content has dramatically increased, the generally available user interface, control device options and frameworks for televisions has not changed much over the last 30 years. Printed guides are still the most prevalent mechanism for conveying programming information. The multiple button remote control with up and down arrows is still the most prevalent channel/content selection mechanism. The reaction of those who design and implement the TV user interface to the increase in available media content has been a straightforward extension of the existing selection procedures and interface objects. Thus, the number of rows in the printed guides has been increased to accommodate more channels. The number of buttons on the remote control devices has been increased to support additional functionality and content handling, e.g., as shown in FIG. 1. However, this approach has significantly increased both the time required for a viewer to review the available information and the complexity of actions required to implement a selection. Arguably, the cumbersome nature of the existing interface has hampered commercial implementation of some services, e.g., video-on-demand, since consumers are resistant to new services that will add complexity to an interface that they view as already too slow and complex.
In addition to increases in bandwidth and content, the user interface bottleneck problem is being exacerbated by the aggregation of technologies. Consumers are reacting positively to having the option of buying integrated systems rather than a number of separate components. An example of this trend is the combination television/VCR/DVD in which three previously independent components are frequently sold today as an integrated unit. This trend is likely to continue with an end result that potentially all of the communication devices currently found in the household will be packaged together as an integrated unit, e.g., a television/VCR/DVD/internet access/radio/stereo unit. Even those who continue to buy separate components will likely desire seamless control of, and interworking between, the separate components. With this increased aggregation comes the potential for more complexity in the user interface. For example, when so-called “universal” remote units were introduced, e.g., to combine the functionality of TV remote units and VCR remote units, the number of buttons on these universal remote units was typically more than the number of buttons on either the TV remote unit or VCR remote unit individually. This added number of buttons and functionality makes it very difficult to control anything but the simplest aspects of a TV or VCR without hunting for exactly the right button on the remote. Many times, these universal remotes do not provide enough buttons to access many levels of control or features unique to certain TVs. In these cases, the original device remote unit is still needed, and the original hassle of handling multiple remotes remains due to user interface issues arising from the complexity of aggregation. Some remote units have addressed this problem by adding “soft” buttons that can be programmed with the expert commands. These soft buttons sometimes have accompanying LCD displays to indicate their action. These too have the flaw that they are difficult to use without looking away from the TV to the remote control. Yet another flaw in these remote units is the use of modes in an attempt to reduce the number of buttons. In these “moded” universal remote units, a special button exists to select whether the remote should communicate with the TV, DVD player, cable set-top box, VCR, etc. This causes many usability issues including sending commands to the wrong device, forcing the user to look at the remote to make sure that it is in the right mode, and it does not provide any simplification to the integration of multiple devices. The most advanced of these universal remote units provide some integration by allowing the user to program sequences of commands to multiple devices into the remote. This is such a difficult task that many users hire professional installers to program their universal remote units.
Some attempts have also been made to modernize the display interface between end users and media systems. However, these attempts typically suffer from, among other drawbacks, an inability to easily scale between large collections of media items and small collections of media items. For example, interfaces which rely on lists of items may work well for small collections of media items, but are tedious to browse for large collections of media items. Interfaces which rely on hierarchical navigation (e.g., tree structures) may be speedier to traverse than list interfaces for large collections of media items, but are not readily adaptable to small collections of media items. Additionally, users tend to lose interest in selection processes wherein the user has to move through three or more layers in a tree structure. For all of these cases, current remote units make this selection processor even more tedious by forcing the user to repeatedly depress the up and down buttons to navigate the list or hierarchies. When selection skipping controls are available such as page up and page down, the user usually has to look at the remote to find these special buttons or be trained to know that they even exist. Accordingly, organizing frameworks, techniques and systems which simplify the control and display interface between users and media systems as well as accelerate the selection process, while at the same time permitting service providers to take advantage of the increases in available bandwidth to end user equipment by facilitating the supply of a large number of media items and new services to the user have been proposed in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/768,432, filed on Jan. 30, 2004, entitled “A Control Framework with a Zoomable Graphical User Interface for Organizing, Selecting and Launching Media Items”, the disclosure of which is incorporated here by reference.
Of particular interest for this specification are the remote devices usable to interact with such frameworks, as well as other applications and systems. As mentioned in the above-incorporated application, various different types of remote devices can be used with such frameworks including, for example, trackballs, “mouse”-type pointing devices, light pens, etc. However, another category of remote devices which can be used with such frameworks (and other applications) is 3D pointing devices. The phrase “3D pointing” is used in this specification to refer to the ability of an input device to measure motion in three dimensional space. Three dimensional space has six degrees of freedom (6DOF): three axes of linear motion and three axes of angular motion. Although the term 6DOF is commonly used, the seventh dimension of time is automatically included. The position (or pose) of a device may be represented by its linear position and angular position (orientation). The 3D pointing device moves within the six degrees of freedom in the air in front of, e.g., a display, and the corresponding ability of the user interface to translate those motions directly into user interface commands, e.g., movement of a cursor on the display. Thus “3D pointing” differs from, e.g., conventional computer mouse pointing techniques which use a surface, e.g., a desk surface or mousepad, as a proxy surface from which relative movement of the mouse is translated into cursor movement on the computer display. An example of a 3D pointing device can be found in U.S. Pat. No. 7,118,518 to Matthew G. Liberty (hereafter referred to as the '518 patent), the disclosure of which is incorporated here by reference. The motion data is transferred between the 3D pointing device and the host system. The motion data transfer may be performed by any communication link including wired, radio frequency, ultrasonic and infrared.
Two primary methods exist for mapping device motion into cursor motion: absolute pointing and relative pointing. With absolute pointing, the desired cursor location is the location where the forward vector of the device intersects the plane of the display. If the 3D pointer were a laser pointer, this cursor location would be the location of the projected laser dot. With absolute pointing, the pointing resolution for angular motions varies with linear position. The further the user is from the display, the finer the angular motion required to target objects. The angular motion resolution also varies with the off-axis angle. When the user is to the side of the display, smaller angular motions are required than when the user is at the same distance directly in front of the display. This variation in pointing resolution yields an inconsistent user experience. When part of a TV remote control, this variation causes inconsistent behavior between homes and even between seats at the same home. Absolute pointing is, however, normally repeatable and time invariant. If the 3D pointer is placed in the same position, then the cursor will return to the same position. Absolute pointing may also be non-calibrated and referenced to an initial starting position.
With relative pointing, the pointing resolution for all motion is independent of linear position and angular position from the display. However, the device may not be aligned with the cursor on the display. Relative pointing allows for non-linear processing including pointer ballistics which can dramatically improve pointing performance. Pointer ballistics are described, for example, at http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/pointer-bal.mspx. Relative pointing often bounds cursor motion to the display bounds and discards any motion beyond the display bounds. While this allows users to relax and find a comfortable position, some applications benefit from a fixed mapping between device position and cursor location.
However, solutions exist beyond pure absolute pointing and pure relative pointing. Accordingly, there is still room for improvement in the area of mapping of, e.g., device movement to display, handheld device design, generally, and 3D pointer design, more specifically. For the remainder of this specification, absolute pointing refers to solutions that have characteristics most similar to true absolute pointing and relative pointing refers to solutions that have characteristics most similar to true relative pointing.